Set against the intricately patterned oak parquet floors and the robber baron-luxe red velvet sofas of the Rose Club, the affair took on the air of Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred — if Mrs. Astor had been conducting a casting call for “Gossip Girl.”

But this was no ordinary cotillion. The black-tie party was for the Native Society, a new club that is limited to native New Yorkers, many of them city dwellers who might reside in 10021 — the ZIP code of upper Park and Fifth Avenues — or be graduates of certain prep schools.

“You can’t apply,” explained its founder, Oliver Estreich, 24, the son of an architect and interior designer who grew up on East 85th and Park Avenue. He formed the society in October with a few friends from prep school whom he refers to as his “administrators.” It quickly grew to several dozen, mostly by word of mouth, and now claims nearly 400 members.

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The society sees itself as a professional networking club.Credit
Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Despite the hush-hush exclusivity, its gatherings have already elicited eye-rolls. After a December party at the Classic Car Club near SoHo, the party blog Guest of a Guest cattily dismissed the group as “a sort of Saint A’s, the Princeton/Columbia faux-literary society that aspires to bolster social cachet through exclusivity but only serves as a safety net for the awkward in need of constant validation.”

Mr. Estreich and other members shrug off the notion that the group, which he described to the party blog as a “traveling Soho House meets 740 Park Avenue,” is just another private club (albeit, one without walls) for idle Upper East Side trust-fund kids. They see it as an online-and-offline professional networking club for well-born insiders who would find the typical networking event (not to mention, Facebook) a little mass.

Think of it as LinkedIn for the Bridgehampton polo set. If you’re lucky enough to have been born on third base, the Native Society has arisen to help you get home. “It’s not about who you were born, or what you were given, but what you’ve made of yourself,” explained one member, Alexa Winner, a 22-year-old stylist and fashion designer. “Anyone can come from a wealthy family, but it takes actual brains and ambition to do something with that.”

Native sensibility. Native mind-set. Those terms were tossed around at the Plaza gathering. Like Zen monks marinating on the essence of nothingness, members tried to put their finger on that ineffable quality that makes them worthy of membership.

To Anne de la Mothe Karoubi, 24, who went to the Marymount School, it’s an intellectual precociousness. “When you grow up in New York City, our minds develop faster,” she said. “You’re not from Wisconsin, you’re not from the middle of America. We’re international, we’re focused, we’re driven.”

To David T. Libertson, 23, an art dealer and consultant who attended Dalton, it’s a clubby familiarity. “You go on LinkedIn, you see one degree of separation, two degrees, three degrees, then it’s just all your other connections,” he said. “I can literally say I know everyone in this room through one other person.”

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Oliver Estreich (far right), founder of the Native Society, at the society’s Feb. 11 party at the Plaza.Credit
Marcus Yam for The New York Times

To Ms. Winner (“like winner, not a loser,’” she said, spelling her name), it was about a level of refinement and learning. She looked ready to accept the 1957 Oscar for best actress, in a flowing gold Maggie Norris Couture gown and chinchilla stole.

As guests mingled over champagne, the ash-haired Mr. Estreich, with his prominent jaw and above-it-all smile, worked the room with the practiced suaveness of a junior Sirio Maccioni, his boyish build (he could pass for 18) swimming a bit in his banker-ish gray pinstripe suit. Observing the scene, one half-expected Whit Stillman, the director of the 1990 film “Metropolitan,” to storm into the room, yelling “Cut!”

In a way, the party felt more like a New York prep school reunion than networking party —which, in a sense, it was. There was, after all, a native society before there was ever a Native Society.

Mr. Estreich went to Browning (John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s alma mater) and chummed around with folks from Trinity, Birch Wathen Lenox and Marymount. They hung out over tuna tartare at La Goulue, the recently shuttered Madison Avenue bistro that was popular with the East Side prep set. (Sabine Latapie, whose father was an owner of the restaurant, is also a member.)

Together, they formed a privileged bunch. But college was a different matter. Removed from their Upper East Side sanctum, some felt adrift among students from more-provincial private schools or, even more foreign, public schools.

“I felt like I was back-tracking,” said Kristy Rao, who said that she felt estranged from the sorority scene at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. She had been the kind of city kid who summered on the fjords of Norway and sipped Côtes du Rhône at sidewalk cafes with her parents at 15. She was aghast to find fellow students sucking back Jell-O shots and dressing up for “pimps and hos” theme parties. “My return to New York automatically improved my mental state,” she recalled.

Likewise, Mr. Estreich found himself hanging out mostly with other New Yorkers at George Washington University in Washington, where he studied marketing and psychology. After graduation, he was dismayed to see the old gang so out of touch, so he started the Native Society as a way of bringing back the old crew. “People you grow up with,” he said, “they’re like family.”

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Credit
Marcus Yam for The New York Times

It started out on Facebook, but as a clubhouse for elites, it was anything but exclusive. “My dog is on Facebook,” Mr. Estreich said, with a contemptuous snort.

Members of the Upper East Side social elite, of course, have always huddled in exclusive clubs. It was a way of reassuring the world, and themselves, of their social distinction. “It’s always been true of the so-called upper class in America that they paid for their unearned privileges with a certain amount of anxiety,” said Nelson W. Aldrich Jr., author of “Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America.” “It’s the fear of falling.”

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These old-line clubs, however, never encouraged anything so crass as “networking,” In fact, there were rules against conducting obvious business within their walls. “If you ever were to take out a piece of paper and a pen in any club I was ever in, you would be reprimanded,” Mr. Aldrich said.

Such behavior would seem highly vulgar to self-defined members of the upper class. “In the old days, one of the ways you showed your distinction from the middle class was that you didn’t hustle,” he added. “You might work hard, but you tried hard not to show it.”

But that may be changing in a modern city where fortunes are accumulated by people who don’t give two shakes about getting seconded for the racquet club, or seeing their daughter make her debut at the Waldorf.

“It used to be breeding among the WASPs, but that doesn’t exactly exist now,” said David Patrick Columbia, the editor of newyorksocialdiary.com. Now, he said, it’s about money. And in today’s New York, he said, even money “becomes ordinary, so you have to find a new outlet, a new means for aspiration.”

“Exclusivity is one of them: ‘I am and you’re not,’ ” he said.

That might explain the enduring allure of elite social clubs like the Knickerbocker Club and the Brook Club, as well as newer virtual tribes like A Small World, an invitation-only social network for self-described jet-setters, and the Libertine Society, a discreet members-only social and networking organization for well-heeled professionals.

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Credit
Marcus Yam for The New York Times

In a sense, a Native Society party is like a country club. It’s loose, it’s casual and there’s no riff-raff. Already, Mr. Estreich said, deals are being struck, including a film project under discussion involving a producer, a director and an actress — all members.

“The wall is down,” he said, “when you’re a member of the Native Society.”

The Native Society started its Web site in November (actually, there were two: a public site and a private site, where members can post their vacation photos of the South of France or hook each other up with apartment leads). By the time of its first event, the Classic Car Club party, it was growing quickly enough to inspire talk about starting Los Angeles and Washington chapters.

Membership parameters have also loosened. It’s no longer restricted to people who understand that the soft-shell crabs are the thing to order at Swifty’s. The group now includes musicians from the Lower East Side, a painter on the Upper West Side, even folks who hail from far-off lands like Connecticut (you can be an “honorary member” if you’re born outside the city, so long as you display the Native mind-set, Mr. Estreich explained).

Larger parties, like the one at the Plaza, amount to rush parties, where candidates are brought for inspection. A counsel of 14 administrators functions like a Sutton Place co-op board and decides whom to admit.

For the inner circle, there are also private parties, drawing 25 or so to members’ East Side town houses or art-filled SoHo lofts. No one talks about the rituals at those events. “That’s where we burn lambs,” joked Freddie Fackelmayer, a member who wears his hair in a dramatic swoop of forelocks — call it the Fop Flop — familiar from a thousand Ralph Lauren ads.

Certainly, the vision of smartly attired young preppies trading gossip at the mantel of their parents’ Park Avenue duplex does seem lifted frame-for-frame from the movie “Metropolitan,” which concerns a young tribe of Upper East Siders who anxiously guard their rarefied life of balls and gentlemen’s clubs.

But Mr. Estreich insists he has no interest in playing the role of the film’s character Charlie Black, who frets about the declining cultural relevance of his little pack — which he labels the “U.H.B.’s,” for “urban-haute bourgeoisie.”

“Metropolitan’ is a satire based on Upper East Side snobs who are stiff and don’t do anything with their time,” Mr. Estreich said. “The Native Society is exactly the opposite: people who happen to come from privilege and want to do things with their life.”

So long as they make the cut.

A version of this article appears in print on March 3, 2011, on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Edith Wharton’s World, Recast for ‘Gossip Girl’. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe